Environmental, climate change and renewable energy industry participants and proponents are gearing up for four long, lean years in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise U.S. election victory. They’re not abandoning all hope, however; and Trump could pull an even greater surprise if he does an about-face and embraces Obama’s legacy of helping build U.S. renewable energy and clean tech industries that are bringing back middle-class U.S. jobs and spurring investment, innovation and entrepreneurship in ways that benefit US and global society in multiple ways.

Developed by IFC in collaboration with BHP Billiton and Conservation International, some of the world’s largest Institutional investors, including TIAA-CREF and QBE, bought the first Forest Bonds issue, which gives them the option of receiving coupon payments in the form of cash or carbon credits from a UN REDD program in Kenya.

National representatives to the UN Montreal Protocol took action to phase out production and use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) at a meeting in Kigali, Rwanda this past week. In addition to further reducing destruction of atmospheric ozone, the Kigali Agreement is expected to reduce projected mean global temperature rise 0.5 degrees Celsius over the course of the century.

Issuing its ninth request for proposals this week, Rwanda’s Green Fund, FONERWA continues to empower Rwandans, funding and assisting stakeholders to carry out projects that improve socioeconomic conditions, create employment and new business development opportunities while leveraging and conserving the country’s natural capital.

There are powerful social, environmental and economic implications associated with transparency. Corporations are not the only ones that should be concerned about transparency; governments, employees, consumers and the whole of civil society all have a stake. Transparency is about open access to an organization’s activities and this has implications for everything from climate change to the bottom line. Starbuck’s CEO Howard Schultz effectively communicated the…

A team of researchers from the World Bank, Resources for the Future, Applied Geosolutions and others have released three working papers that set out wealth valuation methodologies spanning all the commercial wood, non-wood and ecosystems services forests provide and incorporated them in a global sustainable forest management database.